Friday, March 23, 2012

I was there to bring the life and works of Lorenzo Thomas back to the AWP -- At the first AWP I ever attended, Lorenzo and I were doing the same thing with the life and works of Sterling Brown. This year I was on a panel with Grant Jenkins and Tyrone Williams, organized by Carla Harryman.

It struck me that I was attending a lot of memorial panels: Akilah Oliver, Eleanor Ross Taylor, Edouard Glissant, etc.

Friday, March 09, 2012

Jimmy Ellis of The Trammps has passed away -- I got a request from someone too young to own a copy of my first book for the poem that borrowed its title from The Trammps' 70s hit DISCO INFERNO -- so here's the poem, which I always imagined being read in Ellis's voice.

DISCO INFERNO

(1948)

Good Hair favored and was favored by his father

In a time when being fair was being favored

He hadn't asked for either being born had left him

Marked along his outside in visible sign

The contributions of both his fathers' worlds and his mother's

Cloak of many colors coated him sealing off

The impertinenece of tragedians but not of his brothers

Who considered it a sin everybody loved Good Hair

But not his brothers who could not fit his fortune

To theirs wondered why he played at Indian chief

African king Mexican cowboy everything

But what he was since what he was

Was why he was so

Favored in spite of all he hadn't asked

For yet he played the part accepted the ashen gift

And handed nothing round to them

Three times a seventh son he grew and as he grew

More freely longed to lord it over till taking

Good Hair in hand his brothers pulled his prideful thing out

From the house into the field and drawing him across a preaching stone

Monday, March 05, 2012

It's a long walk to Louisville, to paraphrase the Staple Singers. 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of the conference formerly known as the Twentieth Century Literature conference, now rechrisitened as the University of Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900, or "LCLC" antiacronymically. I was there to participate in the first of a rolling series of panels on the life and legacy of Gil Scott-Heron, featuring papers by Tyrone Williams and Stephane Robollin along with mine. The next of these panels will be at CLA in Atlanta later this month, with Tony Bolden and Mickey New, and a third will be presented at ALA in San Francisco at the end of May. Keynoters at Louisville this year included Simon Critchley, Karen Tei Yamashita, Tom McCarthy and Dee Morris. Though there were no keynote poetry readings this time out, Dee's presentation on digital poetries was a great way to close out the conference. As in past years, we retired to La Casa Golding for poetry and partying once we had all the sessions behind us. The party poetry reading will go up on Penn Sound shortly.